The Top Twenty Programmer Tips!

One feature attracting a lot of attention is Smart Tags, aconcept whereby Office tags certain pieces of text as having a meaning inthe real world. So, imagine youre giving an employee the push and writing hisdismissal letter. Instead of having to search for all previous warnings, youcould simply select his name and retrieve all related documents. Or find outwhere he lives. Or send him e-mail. Or whatever.

In other words, using Smart Tags, were bringing humanintelligence to computerised words. And this very feature is already present inboth Word and Excel.

Why is it important? Well, Smart Tags can be greatlyextended by developers to perhaps recognise, connect and perform actions inresponse to certain pieces of data whether its illnesses, book titles,suppliers, anything.

But watch out even though the feature is great, youll still need eitherVisual Basic or Visual C++ to make use of the bundled Smart Tag SDK. Oh, and theSDK is also available as a free 350k download from Microsoft so, good stuff,but not yet much incentive to shell out extra for the Office XP Developeredition. Oh no.